Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism

Published:ProsveshcheniyeNo 3., March 1913.  Signed:V. I..  Published according 
	  to theProsveshcheniyetext.Source:Lenin’sCollected 
	  Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow,Volume 19,
      pages21-28.Translated:The Late George HannaOriginal Transcription:Lee 
	  Joon KooandMarc 
	  LuziettiRe-Marked up by:K. Goins(2008)Public Domain:Lenin Internet Archive (1996).You may freely copy, distribute,
	  display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	  commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	  Archive” as your source.

This article was published in 1913 inProsveshcheniyeNo. 3,
  dedicated to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Marx’s death.

Prosveshcheniye(Enlightenment) was a Bolshevik
  social, political and literary monthly published legally in St. Petersburg
  from December 1911 onwards. Its inauguration was proposed by Lenin to
  replace the Bolshevik journalMysl(Thought), a Moscow
  publication banned by the tsarist government. Lenin directed the work of
  the journal from abroad and wrote the following articles for it:
  “Fundamental Problems of the Election Campaign”, 
  “Results of the Election”, “Critical Remarks on the 
  National Question”, “The Right of
  Nations to Self-Determination”, and others.

The journal was suppressed by the tsarist government in June
  1914, on the eve of the First World War. Publication was resumed in the
  autumn of 1917 but only one double number appeared; this number contained
  two articles by Lenin: “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” and “A
  Review of the Party Programme”.

Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke
the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and
liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no
other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social
science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another,allofficial and liberal sciencedefendswage-slavery,
whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect
science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as
to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether
workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of
capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of
social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling
“sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound,
petrified doctrine, a doctrine which aroseaway fromthe high road
of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of
Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions
already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as
the direct and immediatecontinuationof the teachings of the
greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.

The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is
comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world
outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence
of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that
man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by Germanphilosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component
parts that we shall outline in brief.

The philosophy of Marxism ismaterialism. Throughout the
modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth
century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every
kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas,
materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true
to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant
and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all
their efforts to “refute”, undermine and defame materialism, and have
advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way
or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.

Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most
determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is
every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully
expounded in the works of Engels,Ludwig FeuerbachandAnti-Dühring, which, like theCommunist Manifesto, are
handbooks for every class-conscious worker.

But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism:
he developed philosophy to a higher level, he enriched it with the
achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system,
which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main
achievement wasdialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in
its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the
relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of
eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural
science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—have been a
remarkable confirmation of Marx’s dialectical materialism despite the
teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to
old and decadent idealism.

Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and
extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition ofhuman
society. Hishistorical materialismwas a great achievement
in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously
reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly
integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence
of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life
another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows
out of feudalism.

Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter),
which exists independently of him, so man’ssocial knowledge(i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious,
political and so forth) reflects theeconomic systemof
society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic
foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the
modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the
bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has
provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful
instruments of knowledge.

Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which
the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest
attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work,Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern,
i.e., capitalist, society.

Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most
developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by
their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of thelabour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a
proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value
of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary
labour time spent on its production.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the
exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed arelation between
people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between
individual producers through the market.Moneysignifies that the
connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire
economic life of the individual producers into one whole.Capitalsignifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power
becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of
land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of
the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages),
while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for
the capitalistsurplus-value, the source of profit, the source of
the wealth of the capitalist class.

The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s economic
theory.

Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker,
ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry,
the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same
phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of
large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery
increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and
falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of
small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the
decline itself is an indisputable fact.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in
productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the
associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more
social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound
together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this
collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of
production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of
existence of the mass of the population are intensified.

By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist
system creates the great power of united labour.

Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity
economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale
production.

And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by
year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing
numbers of workers.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only
the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society
appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a
new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various
socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest
against this oppression. Early socialism, however, wasutopiansocialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it
dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and
endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.

But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could
not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not
reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show whatsocial
forceis capable of becoming the creator of a new society.

Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and
especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more
and more clearly revealed thestruggle of classesas the basis and
the driving force of all development.

Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won
except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country
evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a
life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.

The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from
this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson
consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of theclass
struggle.

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and
self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt
to seek out theinterestsof some class or other behind all moral,
religious, political and social phrases, declarations and
promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by
the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old
institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept
going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there isonly
oneway of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to
find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and,
owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of
sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise
those forces for the struggle.

Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the
way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have
hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true
position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.

Independent organisations of the proletariat are multiplying all over
the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The
proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class
struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it
is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the
measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing
irresistibly.